Highlights on football recruiting

Tracking Football NFL Draft Study and high school sports

As this year’s NFL Draft inches closer we take a look back at last year’s NFL Draft study and an article which used our numbers. The article, written by Jon Styf and Mike DeFabo, examined summer sports schedules of current high school athletes and whether those schedules promote specialization and discourage multi-sport participation.

“Let me generalize here for a minute. Coaches say they love multi-sport athletes, as long as it doesn’t interfere much with their plans. There have long been issues locally with girls basketball players also playing club volleyball in the winter. What is the priority? Where do you go? If I’m an athlete, I want the college scholarship and want to go to the showcase events. If I’m a coach or a teammate, I don’t like missing players at important times. Much was made out of Tracking Football extrapolating that 224 of 256 players drafted in this year’s NFL draft played two or more sports in high school. Heck, it was even repeated with an inaccurate inflammation. But, the reality is, most (63 percent) of those were football players also competing in track and field, which helps football speed and doesn’t interfere schedulewise. Forty-eight percent of those played basketball and 10 percent played baseball. Tracking Football said, when I asked, that they didn’t see a ton of athletes who played early in their career and then went down to one sport later. That’s the opposite of what I assumed, based on guys like Bryan Bulaga or Jordan Getzelman.”